Seymour Lipton For Adolescents

Seymour Lipton was a dentist before becoming an artist. His interest in art prompted him to begin making wood sculptures with hand tools in the direct-carve method. Later, Lipton began working in metal. After metal was restricted during World War II, he switched to scrap metal and then eventually to Monel metal, an industrial alloy available in strong thin sheets. He was able to heat this metal and shape it into abstract forms.

In his sculptures, Lipton wanted to express the emotional experiences of people who lived, as he did, through World War II: “Sculpture is used by me to express the life of man as a struggling interaction between himself and his environment.” Lipton developed a style based on tension between curved and straight elements, internal hollows and external shells. As the artist later said, he wanted to create sculptural equivalents for the “dark inside, the evil of things, the hidden area of struggle.”